I know it’s out there… just outside my field of vision, waiting for me in the darkness.

I imagine that I can hear it, slurping up through the temporal cesspool, shifting around in the blackness beyond me. It stares at me, with dead eyes, even though I can’t see it yet — won’t be able to see it, until it’s far too late.

I want to turn and run away. I want to flee, to go… anywhere, rather than to get pulled back down in there. There is nowhere to go. It’s pointless to even try. I am falling towards that loathsome pit, with a force that’s stronger, and more impossible to resist, than gravity. I will end up there again, just as surely as I crawled out in the first place.

I am the condemned, given an illusionary furlough. Every tick, every tock, takes me closer. My despair knows no bounds.

I can already feel it crawling across my skin, through it, under it. I can taste the foulness, smell the acrid air as it burns down my nose and throat. I can’t be that close yet, but I am. It’s reaching out for me, grasping, searching. It’s in no hurry. It has Time as its ally.

I breathe slowly, calmly. The first touch will be the worst; it always is.

The grim tide laps at my feet and the monster’s claws brush my face. Once I surrender, it won’t be so bad. It really will, of course, but I won’t care. I will have sunk beyond caring, beyond knowing. I will wrap denial around me and drown in an eternity of grey, until one day, I finally die.